He is probably the most influential of the French New Wave
        directors. His highly personal films are marked by a free-wheeling
        approach to style, content, and story structure, and he introduced
        techniques that broke with the traditional film narrative. In
        'Breathless' (1959), he introduced the jump cut, editing scenes so
        that only the beginning and end of an action are shown. He also used
        written material, interviews, and other documentarylike techniques to
        confuse the boundary between fiction and fact. Later films, such as
        'La Chinoise' (1967) and 'Weekend' (1968), are openly essayistic in
        form, less concerned with character and story than with ideas and
        analysis of social issues.
              Increasingly interested in Marxist and Maoist philosophies of
        communism, for a period Godard subsumed his idnetity into that of a
        filmmaking collective. After some years of inactivity, he returned in
        1980 with 'Every Man for Himself' and has since directed such films as
        'Hail Mary' (1985) and 'Helas pour Moi' (1994), both of which explore 
        the possibility of the divine playing a role in everyday contemporary 
        life; 'Forever Mozart' (1996); and 'Eloge de l'Amour' (2001), a
        mournful study of the precarious nature of historical memory in a
        mass-media age. His eight-part 'Histoire(s) du Cinema' (1988-1998) is
        an extremely personal meditation on the history and nature of
        cinematic art.
 

Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001.